Dan Rowden wrote:That would be the Xians who have indeed persecuted Jews for the very reason (a bullshit reason) that you state. Such Xians still exist in all their grand stupidity. Ask Mel.

I don't know who Mel is, but, yes you can find Christians who hate the Jews for that very bullshit reason. That is disgusting, since Christ himself was Jewish and did not condemn his own people. Hatred is disgusting and pointless in general, but maybe that's just me.

Dan Rowden wrote:That would be the Xians who have indeed persecuted Jews for the very reason (a bullshit reason) that you state. Such Xians still exist in all their grand stupidity. Ask Mel.

I don't know who Mel is, but, yes you can find Christians who hate the Jews for that very bullshit reason. That is disgusting, since Christ himself was Jewish and did not condemn his own people. Hatred is disgusting and pointless in general, but maybe that's just me.

The simple fact that Jewishness is still alive and well today is testament to to how un-persecuted it has been through out history. Many other nations, ethnicities, cultures, races, and religions have been persecuted to the point that they no longer exist and/or were excluded from history texts to be forever wiped out from the consciousness of humanity.

As for Marxism, whether or not it has been successfully implemented is meaningless in relation to what Marx actually talked about. He was looking at history, the present situation, and predicting what he sees as the inevitable transformation from capitalism, to socialism, to anarchy. The point is, any time one tries to implement this transformation, e.g. Marxism, they actually aren't fulfilling any kind of Marx prophecy at all, because the transformation Marx was talking about was, in theory, a largely unconscious one, not a conscious implementation that Marxists try to pull off. From my understanding Marx seen this transformation as unavoidable, but by no means was he advocating that this transformation was ideal or something he wanted to happen. Whether his predictions come true is yet to be seen.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways - the point however is to change it - Marx

That quote I think sums up what Marx was trying to do, get humanity to wake up and change now, not go through a long, painful, and unnecessary transformation as he predicts.

Well, kudos to you, Nick. I think you're one of very few who have actually bothered to give him some thought and, further, to make an accurate remark about Marx—unlike the overbloated "intelligentsia" around here.

THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE DEAF AND ALL YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO HEAR IS THE SWEARING.

~

VD:

Man, you’re so full of bullshit it physically qualifies as chronic diarrhea.

I’m not particularly keen on cleaning up shit, but I guess someone’s got to do it.

Nor do you address my specific criticisms of marxism. Again. let me repeat them for you:

No need. I know where they are and I’ll get to them when I decide to. On this thread, Victor, it’s you who will suck my dick—not the other way around.

Onward…

There have been other peoples who suffered terrible fate, though I don't think any suffered persecution as varied, broad, and prolonged as the jews. Amerindians suffered horribly, but most of the suffering was an unintentional side-effect of European invasion (diseases, which arrived even before Europeans themselves did, as per Diamond's analysis). Armenians and Roma suffered persecution and genocide, but nowhere near the scope and duration of Jews (and your people, turks, made armenians' lives hell).

Not surprisingly, you clearly know nothing but old wives tales about this.

Here, educate yourself on the only “proof” for the Armenian genocide, but do especially note:

The memorandum was drafted by independent legal counsel and not by the ICTJ. The memorandum is a legal, not a factual or historical, analysis.

I suggest you wait til the Armenians stop trying to play the Jewish game (next thing you know, they'll try and convert altogether and apply for residence in Israel) and open up their archives before you shoot your rabidly religious mouth off.

Nick Treklis wrote:The simple fact that Jewishness is still alive and well today is testament to to how un-persecuted it has been through out history. Many other nations, ethnicities, cultures, races, and religions have been persecuted to the point that they no longer exist and/or were excluded from history texts to be forever wiped out from the consciousness of humanity.

jews resisted harder, duh.

As for Marxism, whether or not it has been successfully implemented is meaningless in relation to what Marx actually talked about. He was looking at history, the present situation, and predicting what he sees as the inevitable transformation from capitalism, to socialism, to anarchy. The point is, any time one tries to implement this transformation, e.g. Marxism, they actually aren't fulfilling any kind of Marx prophecy at all

Well, first of all, marx was laying out a plan for action, not just making predictions. however, if you interpret marxism that way, then it is an abysmal failure, because the society is not developing the way marx had predicted -- I covered this point earlier. Where he foresaw class inequality spiraling out of control, a pyramid-shaped society, we instead see a diamond-shaped society with a large middle class.

Of course the test of any theory is prediction. Explaining is easy, predicting is hard. By this metric -- the one which truly matters -- marxism is claptrap. As I had said earlier.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways - the point however is to change it - Marx

That quote I think sums up what Marx was trying to do, get humanity to wake up and change now, not go through a long, painful, and unnecessary transformation as he predicts.

Well, yeah. Kinda the point -- Marx was trying to arouse proletariat to action.

The failure of marxist theory of historic development is simply one of multiple failures of marxism.

hehe, I thought you might go there. Turks raised genocide denialism to an art form -- and a law. You are no different from the rest of the sheep. Armenian Genocide is nearly universally (outside Turkey) recognized as real.

You are so easy. I made that post fully expecting you to deny that Armenian genocide ever happened. Hooo boy, this was an interesting experience. Reminded me of the time when I predicted my cousin's rock-paper-scissors throw twenty times in a row -- he was very easy to predict.

Now you really are trying too hard. You’ve managed to get so pathetic you can’t be taken seriously at all! It’s a shame, really. Nevertheless, some good can be made of it. You know, like the use a sympathetic jockey might put a fat horse to. Somewhat better than brokenhead. He’s more like a donkey.

Turks raised genocide denialism to an art form -- and a law. You are no different from the rest of the sheep. Armenian Genocide is nearly universally (outside Turkey) recognized as real.

Yes, Turkey has some strange laws, but no stranger than the State of Israel!

But, “nearly universally”? [laughs] Yeah, OK. Frankly, it doesn’t concern me that 24 odd countries (out of 190 something in the known universe) have recognised the deaths as genocide. Even if all 190 or so had, it wouldn’t constitute any more proof for an Armenian genocide that it would for a Turkish one.

And once again you demonstrate the depth of your misguided arrogance:

I made that post fully expecting you to deny that Armenian genocide ever happened.

You clever little bunny! Wow. You really should stop impressing us like this.

The facts you have presented on the matter are so blindingly convincing. I concede. The genocide happened because you’re clairvoyant! What was I thinking?

mystex wrote:Why would the Jews be persecuted more than any other group out there? They did kill Christ, but who takes the bible literally?

Not just killing Christ, the Jewish leadership also persecuted the first Jewish Christians according to the same scriptures and some later historical documents. The whole conversion of Paul, the Roman-Jew, revolves around him initially traveling around with a group of Jewish fundamentalists, organizing public stonings of Christians, some sort of pogroms. The Book of Acts is full of this conflict. After a few centuries of being fed these stories, the Christian community had little reason to believe in good intentions of Jews toward the Christians or God himself.

Personally I see the struggle as a form of competition: violence arises the moment the other religious [and by extension: nationalist] sentiment is seen as threat to continuing existence or dominance of ones own. First the Christian sect was seen as threatening the Jewish power structure by its very existence, in later ages the rolls were reversed. Of course for example pagans, witches and Moors received similar treatment, and is fundamentally not different from the later Roman and Protestant mutual persecution and resulting civil wars.

yeah, i suppose I should stop trying to get you to support your statements. it's like trying to teach calculus to an exceptionally bright schnauzer -- at the end of the day, it's still a fucking dog, and at the end of the day, you are still an ignorant clueless marxist without a coherent thought in your head. You couldn't defend marxist theory if your life depended on it. You can only 'argue' about it with those who are as clueless as yourself, preferably ones who share your religious faith in marxism.

The facts you have presented on the matter are so blindingly convincing. I concede. The genocide happened because you’re clairvoyant! What was I thinking?

Dear girl, we know the genocide happened because there's vast array of evidence for it -- evidence which led to it being recognized as genocide by the International Center for Transitional Justice, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, UN's Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, and Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. The evidence is vast and not seriously disputed. The death toll was staggering -- half a million or more -- and intent established.

Your denial just makes it perfectly clear what you are. The historical evidence is broad in scope, and publicly available. Most historians who study the matter, recognize it as genocide. Epistemically, you are no different from Holocaust deniers -- you just deny a different genocide. The evidence is similar in nature, and both denier camps sing from a similar playbook: deny the scope, deny the systematicity, deny the intent.

I am glad I read your twisted little mind correctly, and exposed it to the world. It wasn't hard, but it was definitely unpleasant.

That's a very narrow view. Marxism "failed" in his time because he was trying to work with idiots like you!

it doesn't matter so much when or how marxism failed. What matters more is where and when marxist theories succeeded -- and that would be "nowhere" and "never", respectively.

What's more, real social development has drastically diverged from marxist claptrap predictions, so not only do we know that marxism never succeeded, but we are also fairly sure that it will never succeed in the future, because Marx got the shape of history totally wrong. The branching point where his predictions might have still been at least plausible, passed nearly a century ago. Right now, Marxist view of future historic development is not just wrong, it's laughable.

You marxist losers are so funny. You are like the new-agers who proclaim that the testing of their psychic powers fails because the skeptics distort the ESP fields. There are endless excuses, but absolutely no actual evidence for your theories. Each failure is excused away, complete lack of predictive validation is ignored, and the lunatic train steams on!

Last edited by vicdan on Sun Dec 21, 2008 11:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

Mel is a one man Opus Dei, the sixth of eleven children and father to 7 (that we know of), whose Episcopalian wife, despite being a "saint" in his own judgement won't experience salvation, apparently. Says it all.

1.Nature (as opposed to ideas) as the source of wealth (including, of course, human labour-power).2.Without production (work), society perishes. (Were you people even producing anything apart from Vodka there in the Ukraine?)3.Production for the satisfaction of various needs requires needs-specific, quantitatively proportional distribution of the total social labour of global society.4.The labour process preserves value in and adds value to the commodities it creates.5.The need for the proportional distribution of social labour is axiomatic. No form of social production, therefore, negates this need—it only changes the manner of its appearance (mode).6.Thus, value is created and needs fulfilled by labour (the level of activity in labour-power), and not by “the laws” of supply/demand that conceal the nature of this relationship between man and nature and man and his fellow man. 7.The common element of all commodities is human labour, not utility (use-value).8.Commodity value increases proportionally in relation to average skill and production. 9.Thus, commodities produced by unskilled workers, say, in twice the labour time, does not affect the value of the commodity. That is, if an unskilled labourer produces a commodity of standard quality in double the time, he cannot set the price on the basis of labour-time since the value of the commodity itself has not been affected by it.10.The exchange ratio (or, magnitude of value) between commodities is proportional to the quantity of labour performed. (E.g. from Das Kapital: 20 yards of linen for a coat.)11.Use-value is a precondition for determining product value, not magnitude (exchange ratio).12.Commodity exchange ratio, in turn, is determined in the market by—you guessed it—average production time! (You make it faster, you make more money. You make it too slow, you die of starvation.)13.The commodity understood, therefore, as an object possessed of both use- and exchange-value at the same time (that is, value as potential) is, quite simply, the devaluation and the exploitation of humans and human labour power.14.Commodity fetishism and the market mystique: social relations as the exchange of products (the fetish), the alienation of man from nature and of man from himself.

There’s MUCH more on just this, which I’ll edit in later or add in response to you as appropriate (whichever occurs first), but you can make a start on that.

Finally you choose to attempt engaging a point. What happened to bring about this change? you had a revelatory vision or something? :)

[list]1.Nature (as opposed to ideas) as the source of wealth (including, of course, human labour-power).

BS right off the bat, unless you are so dishonest as to count intellectual labor (i.e. source of ideas) as the 'nature' in question, in which case of course the posited 'nature vs. ideas' dichotomy was never valid in the first place.

You wouldn't happen to be trying one of those dumb definitional arguments again, would you?

The key problem here is the nature of arbitrage. The value of arbitrage, of which trade is a special case, is the value of information -- ideas.

2.Without production (work), society perishes. (Were you people even producing anything apart from Vodka there in the Ukraine?)

yeah, little girl, Ukraine used to be the breadbasket of Europe before marxists took over. Of course you, being ignorant of history, wouldn't know that.

BTW, in Ukraine, it's not vodka, it's horilka. A rather different drink.

3.Production for the satisfaction of various needs requires needs-specific, quantitatively proportional distribution of the total social labour of global society.

And herein lies the problem with planned economy. Such proportional global distribution is a computationally intractable problem. No planned economy can even approach the right 'quantitatively proportional distribution' except by dumb luck, and then only for a brief moment. Market, which effects such proportionality as an emergent feature of local economic transactions, does a much better job.

4.The labour process preserves value in and adds value to the commodities it creates.5.The need for the proportional distribution of social labour is axiomatic. No form of social production, therefore, negates this need—it only changes the manner of its appearance (mode).6.Thus, value is created and needs fulfilled by labour (the level of activity in labour-power), and not by “the laws” of supply/demand that conceal the nature of this relationship between man and nature and man and his fellow man.

That they 'conceal' (i.e. abstract away) the nature of this relationship, is a feature, not a bug -- and it's exactly the feature which renders labor theory of value utter claptrap.

how do you determine the value of a pair of boots? By counting in the price of added labor? But what if the boots are, say, way fancier than anyone really needs? or not fancy enough? How do you determine the needs to which the labor must be proportional?

A free market economy determines those needs by essentially asking people. Prices are information. People signal their needs with their buying decisions, and the interaction between demand and supply is exactly how those needs are met in a 'proportional' manner. The law of supply and demand, girlie, is not a law of objective value of goods, it's simply a comprehension of the subjective valuation by people. Supply/demand is how we figure out the needs; the question of whether a given labor is needful is thus answered by comparing the supply function (which includes the cost of labor, that itself being a dynamic variable) with the demand curve (which is specified by the needs of the people). Consumers decide how much they are willing to pay, workers decide how much pay they will accept, firms decide how to meet the two up, and from the interaction of all three the valuation is born.

Labor theory of value talks about having labor be proportional to need; and if we could simply know the need, then we could calculate the added value of labor as the difference between needs and raw input costs, and proclaim that the value of the product is the value of materials plus the added value of labor, AKA 'what the people need' -- and the valuation we would arrive at would be quite similar to the prices set by supply and demand; except that where marxism talks about knowing these needs (as if we could just wave a wand and know what everyone needs), free market, with the law of supply and demand, already solved this problem.

In talking about labor theory of value, you are putting the cart before the horse. The real trick is not in determining how much work is worth (worth is subjective and contextual, the labor value is a dependent variable in this system). The bigger trick is in determining what it is the people actually need, and then in allocating labor in such a way as to maximize the gain from utilizing it (it's a bigger trick because human needs are much more variable and thus harder to valuate that human labor, the latter being largely a function of time, skill, and pain). The value of labor is then determined by just how much gain we could capture through this arbitrage. The value of labor is not an independent variable!

What the law of supply/demand embodies then, little girl, is arbitrage -- arbitrage of labor and human needs and wants. Labor theory of value, by trying to start with figuring out the worth of labor, is naive, puerile, and simplistic. It concentrates on a relatively simple component of the system, sweeps the more difficult-to-quantify component under the rug, and ignores the dynamic relationship between them altogether.

Value is the artifact of interaction between needs and costs, between demand and supply; and the latter two are mutually dependent as well. To try to treat needs and labor costs as independent variables is like trying to solve a three-body problem by ignoring the chaotic feedback effects of the three-body interaction.

Labor theory of value approaches the economy with insufficient information in hand. Economy is a dynamic feedback system which must be considered as a whole system, in situ so to speak. Labor theory of value is born of the naively mechanistic 19th century when people didn't understand things like chaos theory and game theory.

There’s MUCH more on just this, which I’ll edit in later or add in response to you as appropriate (whichever occurs first), but you can make a start on that.

You wasted half of that list. You already missed the key concept -- the nature of value as a dynamic variable, the entanglements of needs and costs, wants and labor -- before you reached midpoint.

The problem with labor theory of value is not even so much that it gives wrong answers; it's that it doesn't even ask the right questions. The marxist approach cannot result in efficient production, because it's ignoring the dynamic signal interaction of the supply and demand -- the needs signals sent by consumers' consumption choices, the labor signals sent by workers' employment choices, and the costs signals sent by the producers' production choices. Any efficient economy must juggle those pairs-of-pairs (supply/demand relationship between consumer and firm, and supply/demand relationship between worker and firm) -- or rather, a huge interconnected web of such pair. it is a problem which cannot be solved globally, and a problem which cannot be solved by ignoring the dynamic nature of the supply/demand interaction.

Labor theory of value is based on not recognizing that many real-world systems are dynamic and holistic, that you cannot simply decompose them to constituent parts and still have them function. it's like quantum mechanics, where the act of observation affects the system being observed -- the subject and object are entangled, and cannot be understood in separation from each other, but rather only as a whole dynamic system.

I had written a bit about this problem a few months ago. Such naively mechanistic thinking plagues many fields, especially scientifically illiterate losers like you, because it is science which gives us the strongest and most persuasive evidence of the fundamental inadequacy of such an approach -- in quantum mechanics and evolution, for example.

Read that post of mine. it's fairly short, but it discusses the same problem (unjustified assumption of modularity and decomposability) in a completely different field, evolutionary biology, and then tries to apply that lesson to epistemology in general. It's the same lesson I mentioned higher up as being derived from quantum mechanics. Perhaps, taken apart from marxism, you might be able to understand the problem.

As you can see, dear, the fundamental problem here is dispositional. Bad philosophy leads to the problem being approached in a fundamentally counterproductive way, of course producing fundamentally useless theories which completely miss the nature of economic interaction.

vicdan wrote:Well, first of all, marx was laying out a plan for action, not just making predictions. however, if you interpret marxism that way, then it is an abysmal failure, because the society is not developing the way marx had predicted -- I covered this point earlier. Where he foresaw class inequality spiraling out of control, a pyramid-shaped society, we instead see a diamond-shaped society with a large middle class.

I don't think this is the failure of Marxist theory, except as an underestimation of the power of a democracy and a strong republic, even while under capitalism. Still, what Marx predicted is still a possibility, especially as we have witnessed the exponential erosion of the middle class over the past 50 years which is now reaching a breaking point. Were it not for the Central Banking systems pumping vast amounts of debt money (credit) into the economy we would see a much weaker middle class than the one which currently exists, but even this slight-of-hand can not last much longer and we could soon truly witness the devastation capitalism has caused the middle class in light of the current financial and economic collapse.

vicdan wrote:The failure of marxist theory of historic development is simply one of multiple failures of marxism.

Not quite, it's only a failure in that Marx predicted an unconscious transition from capitalism, to socialism, to anarchy, not a conscious implementation by Marxists, which like you said has always resulted in a totalitarian state (espeically when they lack a functional deomcracy which Marx described as "the path to socialism"). But if we take a step back and observe the evolution of society as a whole I think we could see the end of capitalism in our lifetime as it moves toward a a more socialist state, (in a largely unconscious way) where Marx's theory is indeed proved to be accurate.

Nick Treklis wrote:I don't think this is the failure of Marxist theory, except as an underestimation of the power of a democracy and a strong republic, even while under capitalism.

Right. Marxism never fails, except for all the actual failures -- and those are all exceptions.

Still, what Marx predicted is still a possibility, especially as we have witnessed the exponential erosion of the middle class over the past 50 years which is now reaching a breaking point.

Dude, up your meds. The middle class has been shrinking a bit only for about the last decade, before that it increased, before that it shrank... it fluctuates, but remains large.

Were it not for the Central Banking systems pumping vast amounts of debt money (credit) into the economy we would see a much weaker middle class than the one which currently exists

And if your grandma had balls, she'd be your grandpa.

You people are pathetically addicted to excuse-making.

But if we take a step back and observe the evolution of society as a whole I think we could see the end of capitalism in our lifetime as it moves toward a a more socialist state, (in a largely unconscious way) where Marx's theory is indeed proved to be accurate.

Riiight. And the end of the world is just a couple of years away, too, as Jehovah's Witnesses have been predicting all this time -- it's just that the date keeps moving.

When marxist predictions actually come true, kiddo, let me know. Until then, you marxists are just another bunch of delusional faith-soaked religionists to me.